Dark River Rising

by Roger Johns

  “Sort of. Maybe. Now that you point it out.”

  Wallace looked deeper into the trees, her eyes scanning along the floor of the forest, then darting back and forth among the trees. She walked a few steps deeper into the woods.

  “Are you thinking of trying to follow this?” he asked.

  “It has to be followed.” She looked back at him. “A halo of peculiar circumstances is forming around this place.”

  “I meant you personally. Shouldn’t we leave the cross-country tracking to the pros?”

  “Why would you assume I’m not a pro at this?” Wallace demanded. “Because I’m a girl?”

  “Exactly,” he laughed.

  Wallace looked at him, trying to keep her face from betraying the curiosity his whimsical attitude was stirring. “You’re not like any fed I’ve worked with before.”

  “Is that good or bad?” he asked, staring off into the trees.

  “I’ll let you know,” she said, not entirely sure what the answer was. “In any event, once upon a time, my brothers and I did a lot of hunting in woods just like these. I still know how to find my way around pretty well.”

  “Once upon a time?”

  “My older brother died a few years back. After that, my younger brother and I sort of lost our enthusiasm for it.”

  “I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to pry.”

  “And you weren’t. I’m the one who brought it up.” She waited a moment to see if Mason would pick up the thread of the conversation. When he didn’t, she looked back toward the burned house. “Obviously, Matt Gable is of prime interest now, but I’m thinking that even though Kevin Bell is a deceptive little prick, he’s not involved.”

  “Agreed,” Mason said. “If he were, he would never have let Carla see the apparatus in Gable’s storeroom. He would have destroyed it himself. But Matt and the Tunica lab itself…”

  “They no longer pass the smell test.” Wallace squatted down near one of the pale areas, then turned to look back into the woods.

  “Do you want to run this trail right now?” Mason asked, following behind her.

  “I’m out of my jurisdiction. We’d have to clear it with the locals first. I can’t afford to get accused of claim jumping and trampling on evidence,” Wallace replied. “It should be easy to follow, though. It’s pretty clear what he was doing.”

  “Really?” Mason asked, looking at his phone. “Those pale streaks you pointed out don’t seem like much to go on, and Google Satellite shows nothing but tree cover and a few creeks, from here to Tunica. If there’s a trail in there, it’s well hidden.”

  “Okay, city boy, does Google show this?” she asked, using a stick to point out a scrape mark about seven feet above the ground on a nearby tree trunk.

  “Not that I can see, on this tiny screen,” he conceded, smiling at her gentle dig.

  “And just to keep our vocabulary straight, wherever it is you come from I’m sure those things would be creeks,” she said, pointing to the image on his phone. “Around here … they’re bayous.”

  “Got it. Bayous.”

  “How much do you know about birds?” she asked, turning her attention back toward the remains of the house.

  “Beyond the basic wings and feathers bit, not much. Why?”

  “I’m just wondering what kind of a bird lives in a birdhouse that’s wired for electricity.”

  Mason followed her gaze to a tree a few yards from where the left rear corner of the house had once been. Attached to the trunk, about fifteen feet above the ground, was what looked like a well-crafted birdhouse. A wire, almost the color of the bark, ran from the back of the birdhouse, down the trunk and disappeared into the ground. Scorch marks on the bark of the tree, and several others nearby, showed where the blaze had apparently burned away branches that would ordinarily have obscured the birdhouse from casual inspection. Sunlight glinted off a reflective surface just inside the round entry hole in the front. As they looked at it, Mason’s phone signaled an incoming message.

  “Maybe we can borrow a ladder from a neighbor,” Wallace said, heading toward the street.

  “He’s dead,” Mason said, studying his phone.

  “Who?” she asked, alarmed he might be referring to Matt Gable.

  “Echeverría—a plane crash, in northern Mexico.” He held the phone in her direction.

  “When?” She moved up next to him to look at the screen.

  “Yesterday.”

  “So he could have been here, and was on his way home,” Wallace said, stepping back and looking at Mason.

  “Could have been. It looks like his plane was shot down.”

  “That should be easy to confirm. Do we participate in aerial interdiction down there?”

  “No. Not in northern Mexico. And apparently it wasn’t a Mexican government takedown, either.”

  “A rival cartel?” she asked.

  “That would certainly support our turf war hypothesis. And it could easily be the case. Some of these newer cartels are operating like military units, with the training programs and heavy weapons to show for it. Shooting down aircraft is nothing new and hardly beyond their capabilities,” Mason said.

  A gun-metal gray, late-model Dodge Charger, with BAYOU SARA POLICE stenciled in orange on the door, cruised to a stop at the curb alongside Wallace and Mason. The driver’s window descended in perfect synch with the car’s deceleration. The painfully thin driver was hunched up in the seat, as if he were far too tall for the size of the passenger compartment.

  “I’m Jamie Whitlock, the Chief of Police here in Bayou Sara. Are you all friends or family of the individual who’s been reported missing from this address?” Whitlock asked, giving Wallace and Mason a slow, obvious threat assessment.

  “Neither,” Wallace responded, then introduced herself and Mason.

  “Then would I be wrong in assuming that your next stop, today, Detective Hartman, was gonna be at my office, to apprise me of your presence and your activities in my jurisdiction?”

  “It would have been our first stop, but we got sidetracked by an opportunity that presented itself before we could get there. An opportunity we didn’t think would be wise to pass up.”

  “So, if I’m hearing you correctly, you and Mr. Cunningham were driving directly from Baton Rouge to my office,” Whitlock said, giving his statement only a hint of a question mark at the end. “Because, if that’s the case, I guess I missed the call where you phoned ahead to see if I would be in and available to meet with you.”

  “We’d love to have the meeting with you right now, Chief Whitlock. Our situation is a bit more complicated than a run-of-the-mill courtesy call to request permission to poke our noses into your department’s business.”

  “I love complicated. Why don’t we walk and talk, since it looks like you and Mr. Cunningham were about to have yourselves a stroll through the neighborhood, anyway,” Whitlock said, extricating his six foot eight inch frame from the car.

  “Your department wouldn’t happen to have a twenty-foot extension ladder, would it, Chief?” Wallace asked.

  “Will we be carrying this ladder around just for the exercise, or did you have a more conventional use in mind?”

  “It’ll be easier to show you,” Wallace replied.

  As they led Whitlock back toward the burned house, Mason and Wallace took turns telling him the basics of what was going on, including their visit to the Tunica facility. Wallace noticed that she and Mason quickly fell into a rhythm, each knowing what to tell and what to hold back, without having worked it out ahead of time. By the time they finished talking, they were standing beneath the birdhouse in Matt’s backyard.

  “Estelle,” Whitlock barked into his phone, without preamble. “Send Jake and a twenty-foot extension ladder to that house that burned three nights ago on Juniper Drive. Tell him I got a suspicious-looking box I want him to take a look at and tell ’im I’m tapping my foot waiting on ’im.”

  Whitlock looked at Wallace and Mason with a disbelieving grin
. “I got it now. You two were about to go looking for a ladder when I rolled up.”

  “Just for a quick peek,” Wallace said.

  “Nobody will be doing any peeking into that little box up there until Jake has had a chance to go over it first. Just look at what’s left of this house. You’d expect to see part of the frame—at least some of the boards and the contents visible in the ash. There’s nothing left here but ash,” he said, his voice rising as his hands flew about his head. “The Fire Chief estimates it burned in about half the time it would normally take for a house of this type to burn.”

  “Well, that certainly raises an inference of arson,” Wallace said.

  “I don’t think there’s even a shadow of a doubt about that,” Whitlock fired back. “Anyone who would use such a powerful accelerant to burn the main structure might have also rigged the little contraption in the tree with some sort of explosive device.” Whitlock looked from Wallace to Mason. “Jake’s had some training on this kind of thing, so we’re gonna let him have first go at it.”

  “Boy, do I feel like a damn rookie,” Wallace whispered.

  “Better than feeling like a dead rookie,” Whitlock responded.

  As soon as Jake arrived, Whitlock walked over to explain what he wanted.

  Jake set up his ladder against the back side of the tree so he could keep the trunk between himself and the birdhouse. Using a series of flat and magnifying mirrors on extensible rods, he examined the exterior of the birdhouse. Finally, he used a small camera on a long goose-neck to peer inside.

  “What do you see?” Whitlock called out.

  “Three things, Chief. One, there does not appear to be an explosive device inside the box. Two, the glint the detective and the investigator saw through the door hole was the reflection off a camera lens. And, third, there’s what looks like a mobile hotspot stuck up under the peak of the roof inside. You know—the gadget you keep near a laptop when there’s no Wi-Fi around.”

  “Is there any way to tell what the camera is seeing?” Wallace asked.

  “Not with the equipment I have with me,” Jake said.

  “Could you take the camera out and download the pictures it’s taken?” Mason asked.

  “It doesn’t look like the kind of camera that stores anything. With that hotspot in there, it’s probably just sending whatever it sees to some place off-site, and maybe it’s getting recorded there.”

  “Can you tell where it’s sending to?” Wallace asked.

  “Should be possible, but that’s not anything I have the equipment or the know-how to do.”

  “Chief Whitlock,” Mason said, “I have access to folks at DEA who do this sort of thing for a living. With your permission, I can have someone here by morning.”

  “I’ll want name, rank, and serial number on anybody you bring in, and I’ll want it before they commence operating in my jurisdiction. And, because there’s an open arson investigation and a missing person report connected to this place, I’ll want whatever you find out.”

  Wallace could tell from Whitlock’s tone that he was still ticked off about her and Mason’s failure to get his blessing before making themselves at home in Bayou Sara.

  “You get everything we find,” Mason said, pulling out his phone.

  “One more thing, Chief,” Jake said, as he began climbing down the ladder.

  “What’s that?”

  “See that tree at the front right corner of the lot, about four or five feet this side of the utility pole?” Jake said, pointing. “It’s got a little box on it that looks a whole lot like this one.”

  They all walked toward the tree Jake was pointing at. “These are surveillance cameras,” Mason said. “Not home safety devices.”

  “Right you are,” Whitlock drawled. “To provide safety they’d have to be a deterrent and to be a deterrent they’d have to be visible.”

  “And these would have been fairly well hidden until the fire burned away those limbs,” Wallace said, pointing at the scorch marks on the tree. “The bad guys won’t be scared off by what they can’t see.”

  “The question is what were these cameras watching for?” Whitlock said. “What was Matt Gable so afraid of?”

  “What if he didn’t put the cameras there?” Mason asked. “Maybe his employers were concerned about the kind of company he kept? Maybe they thought he was selling their secrets.”

  “Would the kind of off-the-wall plant research you said they do at Tunica call for secret surveillance like this?” Whitlock asked.

  “Possibly. Plant patents can be enormously valuable,” Mason said. “And industrial espionage is very profitable.”

  “Well, regardless of who put the cameras here and why, the fact that they were hidden says somebody was worried about something,” Wallace said.

  The clang of metal on metal drew their attention toward the street. Jake was strapping the ladder to the rack on the top of his truck.

  “Jake,” Whitlock hollered, just as Jake was about to climb into the cab, “I want you and Sophie out here standing guard on these cameras until Mr. Cunningham’s people can get here to take a look at ’em tomorrow. Sophie stays ’til midnight, then you come out and relieve her until whenever the feds get here.”

  “Done, Chief,” Jake replied, as he finished packing his gear.

  “At a minimum,” Whitlock began, returning his attention to Wallace and Mason, “we find out where these cameras are sending their feeds and I’ll bet we get a good look at our firebug.”

  “Is there anything yet on the whereabouts of the missing Matt Gable?” Wallace asked.

  “Not a damn thing. We’ve asked the judge for permission to look into his phone and banking records, and we’ve put out an all-points on vehicles registered in his name—all the usual first steps—but we haven’t heard anything yet. The records request has been in for less than twenty-four hours and Judge Castro gets a bit testy if he thinks I’m trying to hustle him along.”

  “What about a check on Gable’s current location using his cell phone? You don’t need a warrant if you’ve got a valid missing person report,” Wallace asked.

  “Nothing on that either,” Whitlock said. “We called the law enforcement desk at all the cell service providers, and gave them the number for Gable that the Chapman woman listed on the missing person report. We’ve got a standing notification request in case he ever turns his phone on.”

  “I need to make some calls to get the technicians lined up for tomorrow,” Mason announced, as he started toward Wallace’s car. “This may take a few minutes.”

  “Chief, I’m really sorry we didn’t come to see you first, but we had no idea we would end up right here,” Wallace began, sensing this might be a good time to mend fences. “We came from Baton Rouge straight to Tunica and we intended to go to your office after we left there. But Carla Chapman followed us away from the lab. She and Matt Gable were … are a couple, and she’s worried. She spotted us when we were at Tunica and thought we might know something.”

  “I’m glad you bring that up, Detective. That confirms something for me—namely, her interest in this Gable fellow. When she filed the missing person report, she started out as if she were doing so as a colleague, all formal and businesslike. But I think the general consensus around the station was that her concern went a little deeper than that because, after she got it in her head that we weren’t moving fast enough, she got downright surly.”

  * * *

  Mason leaned back on the car and waited for his call to be answered. The barest beginnings of a new theory about Matt Gable had begun to materialize. In order to test his new idea, he would need to reexamine some of the information Don Brindl had used to calculate the size of the cocaine supply in Overman’s territory. His call to Don’s office went straight to an out-of-office message. He left a voicemail asking Don to call, as soon as he could, then he called Neil MacKenzie, the section secretary.

  “Neil, this is Mason. I just tried to call Don, but got an out-of-office messa
ge. Am I missing something, because I don’t remember that he was going on vacation or traveling for work?”

  “He’s home, sick as a dog, but he checks in periodically. Do you need me to try and get him to come in?”

  “No thanks. I left him a voicemail, and I have his cell number.”

  As soon as Mason ended the call with Neil, he called the head of the technical section to arrange for someone to come to Bayou Sara to figure out where the birdhouse cameras were streaming their feeds.

  As he walked back to where Wallace and Whitlock were still conversing, he could see that Wallace was having a rough go of it with the chief, who was probably still lecturing her on the fine points of interdepartmental etiquette. The tension was evident in their postures. Whitlock had positioned his tall thin frame a shade too close, forcing her to tilt her head back at an awkward angle just to maintain eye contact.

  “Here’s the information on the techs who will be here in the morning to check out these contraptions on the trees,” Mason said, offering Whitlock a slip of paper.

  “Thank you much. I’ll be waiting to hear from you.” Whitlock grinned and ambled off toward his car.

  “I don’t think my career will survive any more fooling around in his jurisdiction unless we notify him first,” Wallace said, pointing at the departing police chief.

  “Does that mean we forget about Matt Gable’s running trail?” Mason asked her, as the chief pulled away.

  Wallace shook her head. “As long as we promise not to move or remove anything, or obscure any footprints, he said we can take a look.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Unofficially, but yes. He says his police force and his budget are both too small to do a major grid search on his own and it’ll be another day and a half before the sheriff can free up enough deputies to help. But Whitlock, himself, actually did a careful look through the woods behind the house—a couple of hundred yards in an arc around the back of the lot. But he didn’t find anything suspicious.”

  “What if Gable’s lying out there, injured or something?” Mason asked, shrugging into a palms-up gesture.